Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed

Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed is hosted by Philip Short, BBC correspondent and author of Mao: A Life. Bloody Revolution can be divided into two parts. The first half of the documentary covers the course of the Chinese revolution up to the the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The second half covers what is referred to as the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966 to 1976. About three quarters of the the second half focuses on the height of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969 or 1971; the remaining time mostly focuses on 1971 to 1976 and Mao’s death. Bloody Revolution contains much boilerplate anti-communism of the ‘Mao was a butcher’ and ‘people ate their babies’ variety that has been addressed numerous times and in different ways. The narrative of Bloody Revolution is a convergence of the official revisionist Chinese state’s account and traditional western anti-communist ones.